The Battle for the Soul

Usually, we are blind to the battle going on for our heart and soul, but occasionally our eyes our open to sense the spiritual world. 

Tonight , for me, my eye were open when I almost physically could not put my phone down and handle 15 minutes of prayer. Everything in me wanted, craved, the mind numbing of a Mah Jong game, and it felt as if something had a hold of my arm and kept picking the phone back up over and over. There was this brief moment where half of my brain was ordering my hand to pick up the phone and the other half was pushing my arm to drop the phone, to put it down, and I felt disconnected from my body, not in a weird creeping way, but in a God is fighting hard to open your eyes sort of way. 

Now this is not the first time I’ve written about stupid game addiction. Solitaire, Candy Crush, I get obsessive.  But this is not the same, it’s worse.  I’ve played this particular version of the game for many months and until recently a game or two a day has been enough to rest my mind. But in the last few days it has moved from restful to numbing and very, very much a tool in a battle for my heart and mind. 

I know what my brain doesn’t want to face. I feel like the wave of job stress is trying to rise to equal the wave of emotions connected to the anniversary of my husband’s death. 

It all feels like it will be too much to bear.  I’m stuck in a war between a side that wants me to numb it all, and a side that tells me to cry out to the divine Father knowing that that side will be full of pain as well as comfort, of loss as well as hope. 

It’s all been hard these days, the prayer time, the Bible reading, the quiet times; they have felt dry and uncomfortable in a way they haven’t since he first died. 

God won the battle tonight (I know he will win the war).  I see I am at a fork in the road. I can stick with numbing, games and TV, or I can pursue true real life, with God, with its pains and its joys. 

And maybe someday I’ll write this in a way that is more clear, but there is a glimmer of light in the distance that this has something to do with a concept I’ve not been able to understand, “Eternal life is to know God.”

For now, I’ll put this down now and sleep the sleep of a child who knows she has a loving Father. 

But this is a war, and the result of this decision will affect whether I continue onward and upward this week or if I fall.